Participants The pilot study consisted
of 33 adult, non-public affairs respondents from three major U.S. military
installations: Yokota Air Base, Japan; Fort Myer, Virginia; and Marine
Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina. Thirteen respondents
were from overseas, and 20 were stateside. Seven of the respondents
were in the Air Force; seven were in the Marine Corps; 12 were in the Army;
one was in the Navy; and six of the respondents were family members.
Twenty-five of the respondents were male, and eight were female.

Procedures For the pilot study, the
survey was distributed to the internal audience, both overseas and stateside.
The authors distributed the survey to bases of current assignment, through
co-workers, to non-public affairs individuals. Admittedly, the convenience
sample yields results with limited generalizabilty. However, the
pilot study does give researchers the opportunity to test the survey for
reliability.

Materials and Design The self-report survey included
25 questions and was adapted from Abelman, Atkin, and Rand (1997).
The survey has three demographic questions, two viewing habit questions,
a general impression question, and 19 motivation questions. The authors
included two additional motivation questions: "I watch the global service
newscast because it makes me feel patriotic," and "I watch the global
service newscast because it helps me relate better to the military."
A table of random numbers was used to determine the order of the motivation
questions.
To aid in analysis, the
nineteen motivation questions were divided into five subgroups. This also
results in a more reliable test because of the composites. A question can
test for either goal-driven or ritualized/habitual viewing behaviors.
The survey had 10 goal-driven questions and nine ritualized/habitual questions.
The other three motivation subgroups are: information with four questions,
escape with three questions, and moral support with five questions.
The patriotism question, question 18, fit into both information and moral
support.

Analysis The information motivation
subgroup consisted of questions seven, 15, 20, and 22. They had a
.86 Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient. The escape motivation
subgroup consisted of questions eight, nine, and 24 (r = .68). The
subgroup for moral support motivation was made up of questions 12, 17,
18, 22 and 25 (r = .86) The goal-driven viewing behavior subgroup
contained questions seven, eight, nine, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, and 25
(r = .85). Finally, the ritualized/habitual viewing behavior subgroup
consisted of questions 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23, and 24 (r = .73).
The survey can be found in Appendix A.
A composite mean score
was derived for each subgroup to compare measures of central tendency for
each variable. For further comparisons, the t-test was used to test
if there was a significant difference between the composite variables.
Demographic data was compiled using frequencies of occurrence.